Senior House at MIT Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Senior House at MIT Dies, and a Crisis Blooms at Colleges (2017)

wired.com

112 pointsaj754 comments

Insider here: The sort of shit which happened here -- with "confidential" student data misused -- is rampant at MIT. Survey map to dorms isn't even the tip of the iceberg. My guess is that at some point, we'll have a Watergate-grade scandal, but I've been wrong about these things before (Equifax is trading above where it was January 2017).

I've personally never heard of any other incident quite like this happening at MIT, at least not in the last 7 years or so when I was on campus; could you provide any other examples? The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is psych data being used to send people home on forced mental health leave.

The handling of this incident made me very angry, principally because it's so hard to get MIT students to seek mental health counseling because they are very fearful of retaliation for doing so. The misuse of the mental health survey totally validated their concerns and severely damaged the fragile trust that various orgs student health orgs unaffiliated with this incident at MIT had worked hard to build with students.

Also, this article does a poor job of explaining the recent history leading up to the closing of Senior House, which better explains why the closing of the house was viewed as a total attack on alternative culture. MIT didn't just close senior house, they also knocked down Bexley, another alternative dorm, a few years earlier under somewhat dubious circumstances (suddenly refusing to repair the dorm post flooding iirc?) without proper student input, and I believe there was controversy about a third alternative dorm as well. The students' interpretation of this was that the MIT administration was fundamentally targeting alternative culture and were not negotiating in good faith during any of these closures.

The incidents I know about haven't been publicly exposed. If I spoke about them in specifics, the Institute would retaliate. One I can bring up -- since I don't think it exposes me -- is email.

In essence, if you use an institutional email account (or keep personal data on Athena or otherwise) you can presume administration will read it without permission. If you get into conflict with the Institute, personal emails can come up and be used against you.

MIT has a lot of good people, but "unaffiliated" is a difficult word to use here. The problems come from the very top of the administration. Just because a particular mental health organization is good and built up trust doesn't mean they have the power to not get overruled by the Central Administration later. Until and unless the Institute institutes some real checks and balances, students absolutely should go outside for mental health.

I agree that students should seek mental health care off campus. In terms of checks and balances, one nice feature of MIT is that power seems to be very diffuse, to the point where it's actually annoying to try to get anything done at an institute level.

For example, I was at one point affiliated with an org that was dealing with sensitive student medical data and we had enough political power due to who we were affiliated with such that I don't think anyone could have tried to force us to disclose data.

Power is somewhat diffuse. Ultimately, there are channels for real power. It's a corporation with a small number of officers with signing authority. Ultimately they, in a very real sense, own and control the Institute.

The Institute owns the computers your data lives on. The Institute owns and has keys to the rooms where those servers live. The Institute believes it owns the data too.

What force do you think is needed?

Power at that level is rarely exerted at levels visible to a student or employee -- but it happens. I can't comment on your medical data, but most places, there are discreet channels for what the Institute considered to be more serious issues.

>But groups like Senior House, which define themselves by being different, also run the risk of becoming highly conformist, Packer says. The punk rock movement is a particularly vivid example of this phenomenon. “They self-describe as being different, but from the outside they all look the same,” he says.

They don't want to look different from each other; they want to look different from people like him. It's really not that complicated. Spinning that into alarmism against the idea countercultures in general like this guy does is just ridiculous, and there's absolutely no way he's doing so in good faith.

Why would anybody define themselves as different from someone else? That’s just giving that person control over yourself. Identifying yourself with your own positive affirmation is difficult and scary and maybe the most important thing you’ll ever do.

lol

Pretty much everyone I know who has some first-hand experience with the situation with Senior House agrees that 1.) MIT handled the situation quite badly but 2.) There were issues and no outcome was going to leave everyone involved satisfied.

As someone who has stayed peripherally involved with a couple of colleges over the years, I'd also make a general observation. Do at least US colleges have more rules and regulations than they used to? Absolutely. At the same time, there also seems to be less self-regulation than often happened in the past related to alcohol and other things. I'm certainly not suggesting that people were saints in the past but there seemed to have been fewer of the sort of incidents that involved hospitals and other serious consequences.

I think in the past it was harder to hear about incidents happening and there were less people overall. I doubt that there were less incidents per person.

There's definitely some of that. A lot of things that would have just been ignored or glossed over a few decades ago now tend to lead to (for both better and worse) investigations and news stories. That said, I do think that, to at least some degree, rules have tended to replace self-regulation.

If it were common I’m sure I would have seen it though... it’s not like most of us weren’t in uni for at least 4 years.

The culture has changed in ways that I don’t understand.

I was an adjunct for a class a few years ago. I was shocked/mystified that parents actually travelled in to see some project presentations, and were fussy about seating and picture taking.

That's probably part of it as well. In a lot of ways (and probably only partly because it's become so much more expensive), college feels like it's become a much more serious business for a lot of families. I never did any test prep other than what we did in class in high school and I never even visited my eventual college until I arrived on campus for orientation. It feels that for a lot of families college is now something to be managed a lot more carefully--which of course creates expectations for how institutions take care of their charges.

As a parent, if you were going to spend $150K - $200k on something, you’d be smart to check things out in person to validate that it’s the right purchase choice.

I read a book a few months ago that followed several college students through college and into the workforce.

Two of the girls started pursuing dentistry; both had good grades and came from a middle class background. One of them got good grades, and ended up with a well paid, prestigious job; the other partied hard, changed to an easy course (sports broadcasting iirc) to improve poor grades, and ended up in a poorly paid, low prestige job.

The book attributed their different outcomes to parental involvement - that nobody told the second girl what she was doing. Personally I felt that infantilised the second girl - but I can see why a parent could want a certain level of involvement.

I don't mean to imply I had no parental involvement. Anything but. However, they didn't micromanage with respect to college. They did offer advice on applications and the like.

We did do some campus visits when I was in high school. But we probably prioritized non-obvious "safety schools" and other places that dovetailed with vacations plans. It's just that, as it turned out, I got into one of my high picks and there just didn't seem to be a lot of reason to visit it. I'm sure I could have had I wanted to. But TBH taking a campus tour or even spending more time can be pretty superficial and non-representative and, in this case, would almost certainly not have changed anything.

I feel that the culture has shifted from merely partying, to getting blackout drunk as quickly as possible.

It's not a particularly new trend but yes. And apparently there's at least some evidence to suggest it's getting worse rather than better. You can debate cause and effect. Some have suggested it's in part because more drinking has gone underground in response to campus regulations and community crackdowns. But there really does seem to have been a shift over time.

Also observed benzo addiction skyrocket, while most people consider them to be “safe” because they’re “anxiety medication”

Benzos + alcohol (+ possibly opiates) is a recipe for a really bad time. I’ve seen people take like 4mg xanax and 8-10 shots and get instantly sent to the ER

Two words: moral hazard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

It's the perfectly normal result of adding so many "safety nets" to life that young adults correctly ascertain that they can literally go wild and someone will come along and save them from their own actions. Of course, this isn't entirely the case, so you end up with trips to the ER instead of a friend saying "hey, dude, you're done for the night and I'm going to drive you home...".

There's also this TED talk that I really enjoyed that deals with this issue to some degree:

https://www.ted.com/talks/philip_howard

We need a return to common sense and an expectation that the individual has autonomy and authority over their own actions and those that they are responsible for.

> MIT’s dismantling of Senior House is part of a nationwide trend on college campuses, a shift that places a premium on safety, orderliness, and minimal bad publicity above all. Experts trace the roots of this shift to the 1980s. Since then, college tuition has skyrocketed and with it the competition for students who can afford it. Parents footing the bill are paying a lot more attention. The world has become more litigious and more corporate.

One of things - amongst many others - which the 1980s keep on giving.

I'm a Duke '91 graduate and had several sigma chi friends and witnessed this game many times. Don't know if it still takes place now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwmpLZHKF4Y

Kill the past and learn from autopsy. MIT should understand that tradition leads to loss of knowledge.

If a party dorm that draws pride from pit roasts and drunken mud wrestling is worth having, it will be re-made.

I’m not an MIT grad but that sounds like downplaying the unique culture of SH imo.

Tradition is a form of knowledge, and one that is not so easily reconstituted once it's been destroyed.

Something dramatic started to happen in the late 60's at US colleges. Student demonstrations over the Vietnam War were raging across the country in 1968, 1969, and 1970. MIT, like other schools, found itself with a student body and faculty largely unhappy with the status quo[1]. I was a first year student there in 1969. It was the cusp of a philosophical sea change taking place on campuses fueled by the Civil Rights and Black Power movement[2], the anti-Vietnam War movement, the hippy/free-love movement[3], feminism[4], the birth control pill, and a new wave of recreational hallucinogens. Marxism seemed like a real alternative to capitalism and was actively promoted by student groups (e.g. the SDS , Students for a Democratic Society).

I believe that somewhere around 1969, MIT adjusted it's admission parameters to admit a more conservative, perhaps less disruptive, set of students. In my experience, the students admitted before 1969 were more open to radical ideas and the entrants it admitted in subsequent years, while I was there, seemed a bit less likely to espouse or act in such ways. The older students were more concerned with the Vietnam War and being drafted. They schemed to stay in school, getting advanced degrees, and many of these with the more radical views ended up as post-docs and eventually, the elder faculty at universities today. The students that followed me were spared the existential threat of the draft, it ended in 1971.

I lived off campus and my MIT girlfriend moved into Senior house in 1971 or 1972 so I spent a lot of time there. The year before, she lived in the woman's dorm where most of the women on campus lived. At the time, few women attended MIT and the woman's dorm, McCormick Hall, was a modern, traditional dorm for women. It had a check-in desk for guests, and guests were expected to be escorted throughout the dorm, just like almost all women's dorms at other colleges. Senior House was completely different, and I was quite surprised to see that they had co-ed bathrooms!

MIT is a great university, and I felt like this was a wondrous time at MIT: big ideas were discussed and debated openly in a safe atmosphere where differing views could be held. Sadly, it doesn't appear to me that university life is like that anymore. In my view, MIT has an admirable mission, to advance science and engineering for all humanity; how much should it manage it's students and their lives to best pursue this goal?

I'm no sociologist, so its probably best to take my random recollections with a grain of salt.

[1] http://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2016/7/8/v7rxigo0aw4it8...

[2] https://www.thoughtco.com/civil-rights-movement-timeline-fro...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterculture_of_the_1960s

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-wave_feminism

> the students admitted before 1969 were more open to radical ideas

Perhaps this reflected a broader social trend, rather than a change in admissions preferences? The 1970s marked a growing desire for stability and conformity, as symbolized by the transition from Lyndon B. Johnson (Democrat) to Richard Nixon (Republican).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_modern_American_co...

There was an incident at Caltech recently where a student was told to take down an sign that read “Impeach” (in jest about the house/frat he lived in) because “political speech is forbidden in the dorms”. He was allowed to keep it eventually with posting an addendum saying “This is my own personal opinion, not Caltech’s”

“political speech is forbidden in the dorms”

That sounds a bit political. When the supervisor said this, were they inside or outside of the dorms?

They may still be sensitive from the Nixon incident.

In 1973 some students from Dabney Hovse hung a large "Impeach Nixon" sign on Millikan library (the tallest building on campus).

This upset the founder/President of a major oil company, who cancelled a planned $1 million donation to Caltech.

It also upset the Dabney family, which Dabney Hovse was named for. They disowned it. I'm not quite sure how you disown a house that is named after you, but I'd guess it includes stopping any ongoing charitable giving to the house or the school it is part of.

That "Impeach Nixon" sign was quite unusual for Caltech. Students just really don't have time for such things, because the workload is large and intense. The only known organized act of public protest there before that was in early 1968, when Caltech students went to NBC's studious in Burbank to protest the cancellation of Star Trek.

When I was at Caltech, students organized a day-long shutdown in Spring 1970 to protest the Vietnam war, prompted by Nixon's invasion of Cambodia. This was about the same time as the Kent State killings etc.

Possible outcome of the Star Trek protest: Leonard Nimoy came to campus in Spring 1972 to campaign for George McGovern in the California primary.

I am continually (pleasantly) shocked how many interesting ex-MIT people I meet turned out to have lived at SH (at random times 1970s-2000s).. Even happened at a random party just last night.

Unfortunately, Senior House isn't alone in this. It actually started much earlier, with a systematic dismantling of fraternities which were somehow deemed problematic, many of which had been around for hundreds of years.

The inflection point was generally attributed to the changing of the administration - which used to be more governed by professors and the like who might empathize with students, but eventually grew to be much more bureaucratic; at some point, certain individuals at the top decided to target the living groups they disagreed with. Senior house, being a place where outsiders gathered, and having a reputation of extremes, drugs, is just the latest casualty in the cleansing war against the more tolerated traditions of yore.

This seems very familiar to me as a former resident of Cloyne Court Hotel, the largest and most radical of Berkeley Student Cooperative's houses. It was shut down in 2014 after the settlement of a civil lawsuit about an overdose that took place four years prior. Just like Senior House it was a "a proudly anarchic community of creative misfits and self-described outcasts" and just like Senior House it was shut down for sticking out.

http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/14/co-op-board-votes-convert...

I stayed there in the summer for a conference during graduate school. Even in the week or so I was there, it felt like something between a hackerspace and the headquarters of a zine than some drab campus housing. There were people showing up to practice twirling flaming batons; there were sun workstations in ever nook; there were random late night bullshit sessions.

> Campus lore has it that Senior House residents used to burn kittens in the house furnace.

Ok, I'll bite...

Let's say I sent a message to some FSF/Gnu info mailing list that reads, "Hi. Someone on HN has said that the AGPL is a viral license and can end up infecting non-AGPL-licensed software running on the same machine. I've never heard this before. Is this true?"

Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information.

And I don't hold FSF/Gnu to be some bastion of social grace.

Now, let's say I walked into Senior House after hearing this myth, and I say, "Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?"

What would have been the likely response to me in this case? A social response with relevant and useful information like Gnu/FSF, or an anti-social response?

I’d hope that if some random person walked up to their dorm and said something anti-social along the lines of:

> “Hi. Someone on campus is saying that Senior House used to burn kittens in the furnace. Is this true?”

You’d indeed get an adequately anti-social response.

If you were to follow it up with:

> “Past experience tells me that someone at FSF/Gnu sends me back an email either full of relevant information, or with relevant and helpful links where I can read valuable information.”

I would hope that you’d get an increasingly anti-social response.

Why would you think that some 21 year old seniors, let alone anyone over the age of 14, feel the obligation to respond to random bystanders’ questions of lore? For the FSF it’s an academic mission they’re trying to bring into the world and spread. I’d say that doesn’t appear to be the case with Senior House (and that’s OK).

A question that ridiculous and impertinent would deserve an answer equally ridiculous and unhelpful. One particularly beneficial "social response" would be to mess with the questioner as hard as possible.

"... and, sadly, the 3 to 4 months for the kitten to grow was ultimately what doomed Bonsai Kitten's chances of being the most successful startup out of Senior House."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonsai_Kitten

Is Bonsai Kitten what the "campus lore" was about?

Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era. It's like this weird bohemian puritanism, or the 50s with Tinder. The big difference is the religion. Back then it was nationalism and Christian puritanism. Now it's the worship of GDP and corporatism.

These things are cyclic.

In any case this is too bad. The first time I went to Boston my first stop after the airport was to be dragged to Senior House. Seemed like something out of a movie.

I don't follow your point exactly but we both agree that the closure of the Senior House is too bad.

I was talking about the social trend it represents, but it was kind of an incomplete thought.

> Behind a very thin veil of social liberalism, we are in fact living in a profoundly conservative and conventional era.

Maybe. Or it might be that social liberalism, at least in its current form, isn't that nice. Social liberalism compared to something like social democracy, or even various forms of "capitalism", takes the position that favorable rules are what grants you personal freedom. But it seemingly turns out that a lot of the things we care about exists in the practical realm. Having spent some, but fortunately not a lot of, time in oppressive countries it is always disappointing when you get back to the west and realize that overall it is still remarkably similar.

humans are humans, anywhere in the world.

Religion is simply a selection of social values that individuals hold to be above evidence, critique, or question. We've replaced one religion with another. As the article states: "..the administration allege that those norms were exactly the problem in Senior House—that the strong culture in the dorm, far from being welcoming and supportive as the students contend, had become toxic, a negatively reinforcing environment. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle."

It's funny actually. Anywhere you see the word 'toxic' replace it with 'against wholesome family values' and we've simply traversed to another side the horse shoe. And this didn't start in the 80s. This all goes in an oddly regular 20 year cycle. The liberal 20s, conservative 40s, liberal 60s, conservative 80s, liberal 00s, and now we're headed into the 20s. And it's the exact same pattern over and over, it starts out great but then as the dominant position reaches critical mass they appproach insanity and we start a trend in the other direction again reaching it's peak after about 10 years before it too ends up headed into insanity and we reverse once again.

Well at least everybody can look forward to the 2030s!

Except Americans gain freedoms over time such as civil rights for minorities, ability to choose abortion, gay marriage, environmental rights, etc. It’s not just bouncing back and forth, there is progress being made, unfortunately some keep trying to reverse it.

"toxic" is the new "problematic" is the new "offensive" is the new "sinful".

Worship of the GOP and corporatism? Give me a break. At least neoliberalism or late stage capitalism make sense. The GOP are in such a position of power in the universities that there isn’t a single science, physical or social l, humanity, or other field of study where there are more Republicans than Democrats.

As to corporatism the US has much, much higher turnover in high cap companies than France or Germany. I think it’s akso substantially higher than the U.K. That points at something more akin to business friendliness/capitalism/creative destruction than fascist or ordo-liberal corporatism.

There is perhaps a correlation between worshiping the GOP and worshiping the GDP, but they are two very different things.

The current crop of leaders grew up through the 1960s and 1970s, and seem absolutely determined to prevent that era from ever happening again.

Reminds me of the one hilarious thing about the USSR and when you look into their histories. They were basically exactly as uptight as the US despite lack of any religious motivations, convinced that the west was out to corrupt the youth just as the US was convinced the same about teenagers. They abhorred homosexuality despite a lack of religious basis for it and no real costs - it would save the state money to have their 'confirmed bachelor's living together openly.

Really it is an authoritarianism thing over any other professed values. As generations of teenagers have told anyone who will listen what they really can't tolerate is anyone openly deviating from the norms - not as a result of any actual harm but because they fear and hate anyone who questions them. A non-authoritaran system doesn't give a fuck about trivial things and has a live and let live attitude.

Mods: please add [2017] to the title

Reply on news.ycombinator.com